A bit ago, the By Aries team was coaching a senior business development manager at a large global law firm. Her job includes building individual business development plans for lateral partners joining the firm. Before we started working together, she described what that process looked like.
She’d spend hours buried in her office doing research. Pulling together market intelligence, analyzing the partner’s practice area, reviewing their book of business, identifying cross-selling opportunities. All of this just to build a skeleton of a plan. Then she’d finally get in a room with the lawyer and walk them through it, and they’d react, push back, add context she didn’t have, and reshape the whole thing.
The prep work was the bottleneck. The actual strategic conversation was the valuable part. But she couldn’t get to the conversation without doing the prep work first.
Now she uses CustomGPTs to build that skeleton. The research, the initial structure, the first draft of strategic recommendations. What used to take her a full day now takes a fraction of that. But here’s what actually changed: she’s not buried in her office anymore. She’s in the room with lawyers, having conversations, gathering insight, and building relationships.
She recently shared this approach with a roundtable of CMOs. Most of them had never heard of anyone doing this.
That gap tells us something important about where legal marketing is right now. And it’s not a technology gap. It’s a mindset gap.
The Shift From Doing to Orchestrating
When most people talk about AI adoption, they talk about efficiency. Faster turnaround. More output. Doing the same work in less time.
But that framing misses the bigger transformation.
The real shift isn’t about doing your current job faster. It’s about changing what your job actually is.
Think about what our BD manager’s role looked like before: researcher, analyst, document builder. She was producing deliverables. Now think about what her role looks like after: strategist, facilitator, relationship builder. She’s orchestrating outcomes.
The deliverable (the BD plan) still exists. But she’s not the one building it from scratch anymore. She’s the one shaping it, refining it, and most importantly, using it as a tool to have better conversations with the lawyers she supports.
This is what an AI-ready team looks like 18 months from now. The mundane, repetitive work gets handled by GPTs, agents, and automated workflows. The humans orchestrate. They review, they refine, they build relationships, they extract insight from subject matter experts, they hold lawyers accountable to business development commitments.
The biggest challenge in legal marketing has always been getting information out of lawyers. They’re busy. They don’t have time for marketing. You have to physically get them in a room and pull the insight out of them so you can turn it into something marketable.
Imagine if your team had more time to do exactly that. Less time buried in research and document production. More time in strategic conversations. More time building the relationships that actually drive business development forward.
That’s not a productivity gain. That’s a role transformation.
If You’re the One Leading This Change
If you’re a CMO or marketing leader reading this, you might be thinking: “This sounds great, but I can’t even get partners to approve a website update without three rounds of revisions. How am I supposed to drive AI transformation?”
Fair. The political reality of law firms is real. Partner resistance, risk-averse management committees, tools that get approved but are so locked down they’re useless for actual strategic work. We’re working with a CMO right now whose firm gave her an AI tool that can’t access the web or provide the kind of insight she actually needs. The technology exists, but the organizational willingness to use it doesn’t.
Here’s what we’ve seen work: stop trying to win the argument with logic alone. Start showing them what their competitors are doing.
This might look like a roadshow presentation that benchmarks your firm’s AI adoption against peers. It might mean surfacing what marketers at competitor firms are sharing in webinars and at conferences about their own AI initiatives. It might mean pushing partners to attend roundtables where they’ll hear from their peers directly, or sending them podcasts where managing partners at other firms discuss how they’re leading AI transformation.
The goal is to plant seeds. Make the status quo feel uncomfortable. Help the management committee see that standing still is actually falling behind.
This is often a longer play than a single presentation. It might involve bringing in outside consultants who can speak to industry-wide trends with more authority than an internal team. It might mean commissioning an audit that benchmarks your AI capabilities against the market. It might mean strategically exposing decision-makers to information from sources they trust more than their own marketing department.
None of this is fast. But it works. The firms that are moving on AI adoption didn’t get there because someone made a compelling deck. They got there because leadership became convinced that the risk of inaction was greater than the risk of change.
Your job isn’t just to advocate for AI. It’s to change the information environment around the people who make decisions.
Why This Shift Is So Hard
Law firms have deep institutional muscle memory that resists change of any kind. AI just inherits all of that baggage.
We see this pattern constantly, even in contexts that have nothing to do with AI. A marketing director proposes reallocating sponsorship dollars away from events where partners consistently don’t show up. The data supports it. The logic is clear. But certain partners have relationships with certain organizations, and those relationships matter more than the ROI analysis.
The sponsorships stay.
This same dynamic plays out with technology adoption. Marketing teams that can’t update the website without partner approval on every word. Business development initiatives that die in committee. Investments that get delayed for years because no one wants to be the one who pushed for something that failed.
When AI enters the conversation, the stated objections are usually about ethics, confidentiality, or quality control. Those concerns are legitimate. Lawyers do have professional obligations around supervising work product.
But there’s another dynamic that doesn’t get said out loud often: AI makes workflows more visible. It creates accountability. And if some lawyers already don’t review their own work as carefully as they should, AI doesn’t create that problem. It just makes it harder to ignore.
That’s a harder conversation to have than “we’re concerned about confidentiality.”
The Humility Piece
Here’s something we’ve learned from using AI in our own work at By Aries, and it’s not what you’d expect.
One of the best use cases for AI isn’t producing content faster. It’s challenging our own assumptions.
We’ll put together a strategy we’re confident in, then ask AI to poke holes in it. Find the gaps. Identify assumptions we’re making about our audience or our ideal client that we haven’t examined. Show us where our technical knowledge is more sophisticated than the average buyer of our services, and where we need to make it more accessible.
It’s humbling. We all want to believe we’re thorough, that we’ve considered every angle before we walk into a room with a recommendation. And then AI points out something obvious that we overlooked.
There’s nothing more professionally uncomfortable than sitting in a meeting and having someone raise a legitimate objection you hadn’t considered. Having to say “I hadn’t thought of that” or “let me get back to you” when the gap was avoidable.
AI doesn’t eliminate that possibility. But it dramatically reduces it. You can stress-test your thinking before you’re in the room, not during the meeting itself.
Now, a caveat: AI can be biased. It has blind spots. It’s not an oracle. But used well, it provides perspectives you wouldn’t have generated on your own. And that makes your work stronger.
This isn’t about outsourcing your thinking. It’s about pressure-testing it.
Where to Start: The Friction-First Framework
When someone tells us they want to start using AI but don’t know where to begin, we ask them one question:
What’s the work you hate doing?
Not the strategic work. Not the relationship-building. The tedious, repetitive, soul-draining work that bottlenecks everything else.
People always know the answer immediately. Chambers submissions. RFP responses. Experience database updates. The prep work that has to happen before the real work can begin.
Once you’ve identified that friction point, here’s how to move forward:
Step 1: Map the process.
Write down every step involved in completing that task. Not the high-level version, but the actual sequence.
Take Chambers submissions as an example. You receive the request. You identify which matters to submit. You determine how to evaluate which matters are worth including. You figure out who needs to give client approval. You schedule time with lawyers to get their input. You draft the summaries. You get them reviewed. You compile and submit.
Most tedious tasks are actually multi-step workflows. You can’t figure out where AI helps until you’ve mapped what help would even mean at each stage.
Step 2: Identify where AI can fit.
Look at each step and ask: could AI assist here?
Maybe AI scans the experience database to surface potential matters worth submitting. Maybe it drafts initial meeting agendas for lawyer conversations. Maybe it creates first-draft summaries based on matter descriptions that lawyers then review and refine. Maybe it pulls contact information from the CRM to identify who needs to approve client mentions.
Not every step will benefit from AI. Some steps require human judgment, relationship navigation, or institutional knowledge that AI doesn’t have. That’s fine. You’re looking for the steps where AI can reduce friction, not replace the whole workflow.
Step 3: Define your inputs and outputs.
Before you build anything, get clear on what information you need to gather (inputs) and what the deliverable should look like (outputs).
Is the output a list of potential matters? A first draft of a submission? An agenda for the kickoff meeting with lawyers? An outline that structures the final document?
Getting specific about the output shapes everything else. A tool that produces “a draft” is too vague. A tool that produces “a 200-word matter summary including client name, practice area, key outcomes, and why this matter demonstrates excellence” is something you can actually build and evaluate.
Step 4: Build and test.
Now you can decide what technology fits. Is it a CustomGPT with specific instructions for this workflow? Is it Copilot features within your existing tools? Is it an integration between your CRM and a drafting tool?
Start small. Build for one specific use case. Test it with one person on your team. Refine based on what actually works. Then expand.
The mindset shift follows the practical value. When someone experiences AI actually solving a problem they hate dealing with, they stop being skeptical. They start looking for the next friction point to address.
The Competitive Reality
One more thing worth saying directly: your competitors are already doing this.
When we need to convince skeptical partners about AI adoption, we don’t lead with abstract arguments about innovation. We show them what competitor firms are doing. The webinars their peers are presenting. The ALM research on AI adoption in the legal industry. The Thomson Reuters surveys showing where the industry is heading.
A marketer equipped with AI can do competitive intelligence faster, build deeper research on prospects, draft better pitches, and get into the mindset of the client more effectively than a marketer without those tools.
When firms restrict their marketing teams from using AI, they’re not protecting the firm from risk. They’re handicapping their marketers in a competition where the other side isn’t similarly constrained.
And this gap compounds. The firms building AI capabilities now are developing institutional knowledge that will be very hard to catch up to later. The best marketing talent (the people who want to learn these skills) will eventually leave for places that let them use them.
The objection we hear sometimes is: “AI can’t replace me, so I don’t see why I should learn it.”
That’s the wrong perspective. The question isn’t whether AI replaces you. The question is whether you’re using it to become irreplaceable.
What Becomes Possible
Picture your team 18 months from now, assuming you get this right.
Your people aren’t buried in research and document production. They’re orchestrating AI tools that handle the first drafts, the data synthesis, the repetitive analysis. They spend their time on what actually requires human judgment: building relationships with lawyers, extracting insight, holding partners accountable to business development commitments, shaping strategy.
The work that comes out of your department is higher quality because there’s actually time to do the prep work well. Lawyers are more engaged because marketers have bandwidth to get them in the room and have real conversations instead of chasing them for input on documents built in isolation.
Marketing stops being seen purely as a cost center and starts being recognized as a strategic function. Because your team is doing strategic work, not just producing deliverables.
That’s the shift. Not “we use AI now.” But “we work differently now.”
Moving Forward
Building this capability isn’t complicated, but it does require intention. You need governance so people know what’s safe to use and how. You need practical training that connects AI to real workflows, not just abstract prompting exercises. You need someone accountable for building and maintaining prompt libraries. And you need early wins that show skeptics what’s possible.
If you want help building that systematically, for yourself or for your team, that’s what our AI enablement program is designed to do. Not just literacy (understanding what AI can do) but fluency (knowing how to apply it to your actual work in ways that change what you’re capable of).
The firms that figure this out will have marketing teams that are faster, more strategic, and more competitive. The firms that don’t will watch their best people leave and their competitors pull ahead.
The transformation is available. The question is whether you’re ready to make the shift.
